Growth of American Linguistics

The growth of American linguistics began when European anthropological linguistics arrived in North America to study and recorded native-American languages before many of those languages disappeared. The leading figure in this migration was Franz Boas, who first came to North America in the 1880's. Boas established American descriptivist linguistics and trained the leading American structural linguists. It was Bloomfield, however, who has had the most immediate impact on American linguistics. He combined insights from anthropological linguitics with the then-pervasive views of behavioral psychology and with philosophical empiricism and positivism, to develop American Structural Linguistics. Psychological emphases appeared in the beliefs that the mind began language learning as a tabula rasa, a blank slate, that only what was observable could be used as evidence and that there could be developed a mechanical discovery procedure for doing linguistic research.